nbn™, the organisation building and operating Australia's national broadband network, last week released its third quarter results. And as is now our practice at Vulture South, we’ve shoved its numbers into our nbn™ scoreboard – the table we use to compare assumptions from the nbn™’s corporate plan (PDF) with its latest results …

COMMENTS

Mobile will kill the NBN

Can already get mobile data for $1/Gig. When that halves again, many if not most houses will simply drop the NBN for mobile. Sure, mobile will never deliver terabytes. But for the average household that just wants a bit of internet TV it should be fine. (More towers means less congestion.)

OTOH, ADSL worked OK for most (but certainly not all) households -- 1.5 megabits is enough for TV once Windows Update is tamed.

Re: Mobile will kill the NBN

Unfortunately the NBN *did* make sense when it was FTTP. Only fibre will be able to surpass mobile. And telecommunications improvements have a disproportionally positive impact on the Australian economy due to our remoteness from the main economic centres.

You mention TV and windows updates. The main point is work. I have done 100% remote work for companies in Europe but it is hard due to Australia's poor internet. Honestly speed isn't even the main problem - reliability and availability are the main problems. Mobile is less reliable than ADSL - I know because I am forced to use mobile broadband even though I am in the Sydney metro area.

With all this wasted money on FTTN and HFC I doubt FTTP or FTTC will ever be properly rolled out. Australia will have to put up with second best yet again.

If each of them watch a different show, even at crappy 720p quality you'd need closer to 10Mb/s to simultaneously watch 4 different channels.

So no, 1.5Mb/s isn't even close to what's necessary even for watching TV for the average household - sure, maybe if you live alone and are happy watching 720p and doing nothing else, no updates, no downloading other things, etc.

I personally go through about 500GB/month of data, and I find even my average of about 10Mb/s connection speed often isn't sufficient.

Re: Mobile will kill the NBN

FWIW, my bandwidth monitoring at home shows that when I'm watching the F1 on foxtel.tv that there is more or less flat bandwidth of 5Mb/s through my router (Ubiquiti ER-X into NBN HFC). Now I suspect that some of that is adaptive as in the old days on my ADSL connection I think it stepped down to lower bandwidth and lower resolution when it couldn't get reliable higher rates. (Certainly the picture seems clearer these days... albeit some races I can't get the foxtel auth to work at all, unlikely to be an NBN problem of course.)

Re: Mobile will kill the NBN

I won't be connected this year!

they finally updated the NBN page for our street last week ... I only have to wait to March 2019 for "commencement" of the HFC rollout availability.

The big question I have is if, when it arrives, it'll actually deliver anything better than the ADSL2+ we currently have... and of course if it'll be any better than the 4G/LTE wireless service currently in our area (Vivid) or if some magical 5G service will be rolled out...

> And average revenue per user shows no signs of heading higher, probably a legacy of last year’s wholesale discounting to get users onto higher speed tiers

The biggest discounting has occurred for CVC pricing. First the price was cut from $20/Mbps to $8/Mbps and then NBNCo started bundling CVC with 50Mbps speeds.

Labor's stated intention in the NBN Corporate Plan was to grow revenue through data usage (CVC). The Liberals have reduced the revenue growth from data and supported the RSPs selling unlimited plans. The consequence of this is that faster internet speeds will be ever more costly.

FTTC?

Where are the FTTC numbers and forecasts? I have FTTC sitting in the pit outside my house. I know the fibre is lit. Current service availability date is in about 6 weeks. There is a whole slab of the city with FTTC in build. I also know there are whole slabs with FTTN built, but not yet being made available. Some with nodes installed and cabled mid last year slated to become available in October. Somewhere in all of this NBNCo are lowballing.